Similarly, replies and mentions came into being when users started responding and referring to each other by adding an @ sign before people's usernames.

Twitter took this behaviour and turned it into a finction so that usernames with an @ sign before them became links to those users' profiles and eventually even triggered a notification.

The history of Twitter's growth has always been decided by how people chose to use it. This was, in many ways, the opposite of how something like Facebook worked. Design decisions were made by the makers of the site and people learned how to use them.

There was a time when Facebook was notoriously difficult to navigate. There were actual ebooks out there - manuals for the Facebook interface. But the company simplified things over time in response to widespread user angst.

Twitter on the other hand, kept things simple. It watched what people were doing and just made those things easier to do.

Which brings us to the present moment.

What do you think is the reason Twitter is hesitant to curb hateful nationalism and racist trolling? It's because it has noticed that is what people are using it for. It is because they look at their platform and see that its primary use case is propaganda.

What once used to be a social network became an information network. The question that you saw in an empty text box went from being "What are you doing?" to "What is happening?"

Twitter's problem is not that it is evil. It's problem is that it thinks it is giving people what they want. It's garden variety majoritarianism and "wisdom of the crowds" thinking.

Of course, crowds are not wise and markets are not neutral. They are both controlled by culture.